Advisers say conservative ire pushed
McCain away from picking Lieberman
Elisabeth Bumiller & Michael Cooper, IHT, Aug 31, 2008
For weeks, advisers close to the campaign said, McCain had wanted to name as his running mate his good friend Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat turned independent. But by the end of last weekend, the outrage from Christian conservatives over the possibility that McCain would fill out the Republican ticket with Lieberman, a supporter of abortion rights, had become too intense to be ignored. McCain began the search for a running mate shortly after he secured the Republican nomination, with some 40 names on a list. By early spring he had cut it to 20, including, a top adviser said, at least five women: Palin; Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Carleton Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas. But it was not until the last few weeks that McCain winnowed his list to five or six finalists. They included, a McCain adviser said, Pawlenty, Romney, Lieberman, Palin and Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania who also supports abortion rights. Palin, unlike the others, was barely mentioned in news media speculation.
The finalists, including Palin, were vetted, a campaign adviser said, and McCain then asked his inner circle — Salter, Rick Davis, Steve Schmidt and Charlie Black — to provide him with assessments of each. “He said, ‘Give me plusses and minuses on each of these people,’ ” Black said. One of McCain’s closest friends, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, weighed in as well, pushing so hard for Lieberman — McCain, Graham and Lieberman are longtime traveling companions — that he vexed some of the other advisers. Others in the inner circle favored Pawlenty or Romney. Palin had no strong advocates in the group, an outside adviser said, but she had no detractors, either. Last Sunday, 24 hours after Obama announced his running mate, Senator Joseph Biden Jr. of Delaware, McCain met with his senior campaign team at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Phoenix. By then, campaign advisers said, the group had long decided that McCain’s “experience versus change” argument against Obama had run its course, to the extent that it had worked at all.
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